The Political Possibility of Sound / Mollin+Voegelin
Thursday 30 May 2019 | 19:00pm
OOR Saloon, Zürich | Directions
A discussion/presentation of Salomé Voegelin’s new book, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury, 2019), followed by a performance by David Mollin and Salomé Voegelin with Jan Schacher, exploring the precarious lives of hummingbirds, and the sound proofing qualities of ceiling tiles as a way to ensure privacy and the right to speak.
Voegelin will introduce and discuss her new book of essays, and enter into a bilingual conversation (English/German) with the audience on how politics (understood as the governance of our living together) can be imagined and realised through listening and sound.
The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening – Salomé Voegelin (UK/CH)
The essay is the perfect format for a crisis. Its porous and contingent nature forgives a lack of formality, while its neglect of perfection and virtuosity releases the potential for the incomplete and the unrealizable. These seven essays on The Political Possibility of Sound present a perfectly incomplete form for a discussion on the possibility of the political that includes creativity and invention, and articulates a politics that imagines transformation and the desire to embrace a connected and collaborative world.
The themes of these essays emerge from and deepen discussions started in Voegelin’s previous books, Listening to Noise and Silence and Sonic Possible Worlds. Continuing the methodological juxtaposition of phenomenology and logic and writing from close sonic encounters each represents a fragment of listening to a variety of sound works, to music, the acoustic environment and to poetry, to hear their possibilities and develop words for what appears impossible.
As fragments of writing they respond to ideas on geography and migration, bring into play formless subjectivities and trans-objective identities, and practice collectivity and a sonic cosmopolitanism through the hearing of shared volumes. They involve the unheard and the in-between to contribute to current discussions on new materialism, and perform vertical readings to reach the depth of sound.
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David Mollin and Salomé Voegelin are a Swiss-UK artist collective (Mollin+Voegelin) who collaborate on projects that focus on invisible connections, transient behaviour and unseen rituals. Their work reconsiders socio-political, architectural and aesthetic actualities through the possibilities of sounds, voices and words, whose invisible mobility invites an individual and collective inhabiting and promotes participation.
Jan Schacher is an artist-researcher and perform on stage and other environments, always working with/through sound and presence. Trained as an instrumentalist, composer and digital artists, the focus of his practice has shifted from using sounds organised as music to deploying the body as the central site of action, perception, and culture.
OOR Saloon Sonic Lecture Series is an event format created in series by Antoine Chessex and Anna Frei (OOR Saloon) which invites thinkers from sound studies and sound artists to hold lectures or workshops on their research / projects / working methods and their sound practices in the form of performances or concerts. The format provides a deep insight into discourses and positions found in the field of contemporary Sound Art and Sound Studies.
For more information please see OOR Records website